Your Own Language: Who Decides?

Who decides which version of English we speak? The list is long, but English teachers are not on it.

Everyone has a mental picture of teachers, good or bad, loving or fearful, and as small children we usually think of them as powerful beings. Teachers know better. They are the functionaries of a massive bureaucracy. They are told what to teach and what not to teach, out of textbooks they have no power to change. The only thing that keeps them from being serfs is that the same incompetence that characterizes the entire educational establishment extends to an incompetence at commanding obedience.

Teachers are told what to do, and then, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, they do what they can get away with.

Preachers used to have a powerful influence on language. You couldn’t say damn or hell in school. You still can’t say shit, although, merde, the Aussies say it all the time. Today preachers have been replaced by the purveyors of political correctness. Even thirty years ago, when I first began teaching, one of our textbooks had modified Tom Sawyer by changing Injun Joe’s name to Outlaw Joe. Need I say that it has gotten worse since then?

We have to decide for ourselves what to accept and what to reject out of what the world hands us. To a large extent, we all have to be self-educated.

I learned that early. I spent my first eight years in a tiny school where there were two grades per teacher. Half of each school day was under instruction; the other half was spent doing independent work while the teacher taught the other grade. By the time I reached high school I had developed self-reliance, and I had come to the conclusion that none of my teachers knew enough to teach me all I wanted to know. That was particularly true in English.

I didn’t want to talk like an Okie. More importantly, I couldn’t afford to if I was going to escape to the intellectual life I wanted. My salvation was Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which I read as a counterbalance to the simple mindedness of my textbooks. S and W was dated, even then, and is in considerable disrepute today. A glance at Wiki finds it to have a “toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity” and to be “the best book available on writing good English”. Strong opinions do tend to polarize, but at least they were the prissy opinions of learned men. There weren’t too many leaned men in Talala, Oklahoma. Besides, I was already arrogant enough to ignore anything I didn’t find palatable.

Writers have always been arbiters of English, but which writers? We would all like to sound like Shakespeare but, zounds and forsooth, who would listen if we actually did? If you want to write romances (God forgive you) you will need to master the rippling muscles and heaving bosoms style. If you want to sound like Hemingway, you will have to take a magic marker and scratch out all the adjectives in your dictionary. Even hard boiled writers eventually get tired of terseness. Robert Parker put these words into tough guy Spencer’s mouth, “I felt like I was trapped in a Hemingway short story. If I got any more cryptic I wouldn’t be able to talk at all.”

There are no infallible rules, grammatical or otherwise. That doesn’t mean anything goes. Somewhere in between rigidity and chaos, you will have to find your particular brand of English. And you had better choose well, because that (among many other things) will determine who is willing to listen to you.

Your Own Language, 5: Adverbially Farewell

I am here to present a eulogy to an old and treasured friend, the suffix -ly.

As adversity separates the men from the boys, the suffix -ly separates the adverbs from the adjectives. At least, it used to.

As a matter of full disclosure, I am not a linguist. I am fascinated by languages, but I haven’t taken the time to learn them. I once spoke two semesters worth of Hindi and I can still embarrass myself in German, but my studies have mostly been as an onlooker. I have read several dozen books purporting to explain linguistics, but books by real linguists make tensor calculus look easy.

Still, I can expound on the really low level stuff.

Two factors are at work in language, position and word endings. Latin was not positional. Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered) could be stated in any word order without losing meaning because the form of each word defines its function.

English can be positional. If we say the boy ate the dog, we assume it was a hot dog because word order tells us who was the eater and who was the eaten. If we said the flic ate the flak, we don’t need a dictionary to know who did the eating; word order tells us.

But I also said eater and eaten. These are constructions which depend on endings, not word order. English swings both ways. If I say the eater ate the eaten, we all say, “So what?” But if I say the eaten ate the eater, I am speaking nonsense. Or maybe I meant that the one who is usually the eaten ate the one who is usually the eater, in which case we know we have witnessed an ironic reversal of circumstances.

It can be complicated, but let’s keep it simple. Adverbs typically end in -ly; adjectives don’t. (Ugly is the exception).

Here are three quick nonsense examples, quickly presented. (Okay, four.)

• “The rapid river flowed rapidly through the canyon.”
• “The beautiful sunset reflected beautifully off the cathedral.”
• “The angry citizen spoke angrily to his Congressman.”

Once upon a time and place, say Oklahoma in 1962, teachers taught this distinction and expected student to know it. Even then, however, only word nerds like me continued to make the distinction after the ink had dried on the final exam.

Apparently anchormen never got the word. Ad men say whatever they want, truth and grammar notwithstanding, so they don’t count.

In 2016, if I hear someone making the distinction between adjective and adverb, my ears perk up, it is so unexpected.

I think it is fair to say that Steve Jobs drove the final nail in the coffin. When he urged us all to “Think different”, he made it official that even smart guys don’t need grammar. Now anyone who puts up a sign reading “Shop local” can say, “If it is good enough for Jobs . . .“

Okay, true confession. This isn’t actually the rant it appears to be. I will continue to fight the battle of the adverb personally, but the war is over, and I know it.

Actually, it probably doesn’t matter. I know what Jobs means from context and word order. Losing the -ly ending probably won’t make any difference in the English language. It is just one of the natural ongoing changes that occur in all languages.

Once, in post 53, I said that, as users of the English language facing change, we have only one obligation. If the change is stupid, don’t use it. The loss of -ly isn’t stupid. It just hurts my ears.

Your Own Language, 4: What is Language

The last thing I said in post 73 was that if you want to write, you have to create your own version of English. That seems insane on the face of it. Create your own version of English? Why not just use the real thing?

Because there is no such thing as the real thing. I pity the teachers who have to teach “proper” English because that beast does not exist in the wild, and attempts to create it in the laboratory have all failed.

Language, like history, is a product of the winners. You people in New England; why do you think you don’t eat grits, and say ain’t and y’all? It is entirely because Pickett’s charge failed at the Battle of Gettysburg.

No one does linguistic imperialism as well as the English. I didn’t say British. Great Britain consists of England and three other historic countries which were conquered and welded onto England against their will, and whose languages were crushed by the conquerors.

America gained its independence late in this process. English was already the dominant language and its dialects were dispersed throughout America to morph into the dialects we still have. (see post 12) Conquered languages like Gaelic and Scots survived in the backcountry of Britain to see a resurgence in the last fifty years, but died quickly in America.

After American independence, the languages of the two countries diverged until George Bernard Shaw was able to quip, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” Part of the divergence was due to American adoption of Amerindian, African, and Spanish vocabulary, part was natural drift, and part of it was the rise of industrialism in both countries before rapid international communication was common. To put it another way, American cars have hoods and trunks instead of bonnets and boots because cars were invented after 1776 and before the internet.

The French have a government agency designed to regulate proper French. It doesn’t work. Ordinary Frenchmen disregard it, but the bureaucrats still try. Britain attempts to unify and codify it’s many dialects and languages through its public schools. At many times in Britain’s history, in-school use of dialects that deviated from governmentally supported norms was severely punished.

That wouldn’t work in America. If a teacher from London had had the misfortune of landing in the Oklahoma of my childhood, the local farmers would have taken him aside to say, “You’re from England, why the Hell can’t you speak English.” This line would have been delivered in an Okie accent that the Londoner probably would not have understood.

All of this leads to the question, “Who is in charge of our language?”, but that requires a post of its own, next Tuesday, after we attend a funeral on Monday.

The next posts are tagged teaching, as well as the usual SF, fantasy and writing. I taught school for twenty-seven years, mostly science, along with a little of everything else, including reading and writing. So pardon me while I rant a little.

My idea of Hell is being an English teacher, working all day with textbooks written by Satan’s emissaries, then going home and spending all night correcting horrible writing. My idea of an angel is someone who does that out of duty, or love of writing, or love of children.

The problem with English textbooks is that they are written by people who can’t write. Or rather, have only written for other English teachers, who learned their trade by writing for other English teachers, who learned their trade . . .

If textbook writers had to sell their wares at Barnes and Noble, they would starve. But people don’t buy textbooks, bureaucrats do.

Let’s start with the most basic lie textbooks tell.

Your Own Language, 3: Parts of Speech, Oh, No!

The next time someone asks you if (insert word of your choice) is a noun, the correct answer is:

• Yes
• No
• Sometimes, but not always
• It all depends.

That seems evasive, but it is actually the correct answer.

Parts of speech exist and are critically important in understanding and mastering English, but they are not things, they are functions. I am tempted to say verbs not nouns, but partially accurate analogies confuse more than they help.

Wait! I saw you reaching for that off switch.

Of course you are an adult, and far from grammar school (an interesting concept, “grammar school”) but some of you are teachers and most of you are parents, or will be. I want to show you a fallacy. It won’t take long.

Parts of speech morph. Verbs turn into nouns, which turn into verbs again, sometimes with odd results. When I was a boy, if a salesman had said he had to service his customers, he would have been making an off-color sexual reference. Service meant sex, in absence of emotion; bulls serviced cows. Or it meant the carrying out of a mechanical act. The serviceman (noun) at the service (adjective) station serviced (verb) your car.

A salesman served (verb) his customers, and that act was the service (noun) he provided for them. Over my lifetime I have seen the noun service become a verb again with results that still sound wrong to my ear.

Nail. It is a word, but it is not a part of speech. It can act as a part of speech, that is, it can take on a function, but which function it takes on can’t be guessed by seeing the word in isolation.

“He hung his shirt on a nail.” Clearly nail is a noun here because of its function in a sentence.

“Nail that board back up on the fence where the dog knocked it down.” Clearly nail is a verb here because of its function.

“His new nail gun increased his productivity.” Here nail is an adjective.

Most of the time, as children in school, or as adults learning a foreign language, we get our parts of speech as lists to be memorized in isolation. If a child is told to memorize a list of nouns – bat, ball, dog, horse, house – we have already begun a lifelong pattern of generating ignorance. The brightest students will learn in spite of the handicaps thrown in their way; the rest will decide they are too stupid to learn. And all because we taught them things that aren’t true.